According to The Wall Street Journal, Chinese manufacturer ZTE is aggressively poaching talent from two other manufacturers that have seen better days. Those two manufacturers are Blackberry and Motorola. According to this report, ZTE has already recruited about 20 individuals, but they aren’t done just yet. They have even created a special department inside Human Resources dedicated to recruiting these individuals. This is supposedly a part of the company’s plans for expanding outside of China. We’ve been waiting for ZTE to expand into the US for quite some time now, as they make some pretty interesting devices, but we only get the mid-range and low-end devices here in the US, and those are typically on Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile, and T-Mobile.
In the past, it would have been difficult for ZTE to be able to grab talent from two of the biggest manufacturers, Blackberry and Motorola, but with both of them in financial trouble – Blackberry more than Motorola – it seems like the perfect time to grab some new talent. “We hope the talent from BlackBerry can enhance our product security and design capability“, said Adam Zeng who is head of ZTE’s mobile devices division. ZTE has put an emphasis on those with an international background to help the company expand into North America, which they’ve been trying to do for a few years now.
Right now, ZTE is known for their networking business, which accounts for more than half of their revenue. However, 30% of their revenue also comes from handsets like the Nubia Z5S. So it’s no surprise that they are looking to expand into North America and other regions. If they could sell devices in North America like they do in the rest of the world, we might have another competitor for Samsung, but they need to get into the US first and get some relationships with T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon before that can happen.